Ready Player One Is Steven Spielberg's Biggest Movie In 10 Years

Ready Player One finally opened over the weekend--and it was a huge hit. The virtual reality-themed movie scored $53 million in North America, with a further $128 million from overseas markets in the Friday-Sunday period. That's good for $181.2 million all up after just three days.

That makes Ready Player One Spielberg's biggest hit in a decade, following Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which made $100 million during its opening in 2008. Analysts told Variety that Ready Player One's big opening-weekend haul reaffirms Spielberg as a money-maker after other recent big-budget projects like The BFG and The Adventures of Tintin came up short commercially.

"It put Spielberg right back in his sweet spot," ComScore analyst Paul Dergarabedian told Variety. "He was one of the architects of the summer movie season. It shows that when Spielberg goes back to what people loved about him in the first place, it really pays off big."

Some other notable takeaways from Ready Player One's first weekend were that the audience was primarily male (59 percent), while the majority of those who saw it (56 percent) were over the age of 25. The movie is steeped in nostalgia, so this makes sense.

Ready Player One had a reported budget of $175 million, so it'll still need to perform well in the coming weeks to turn a nice profit. The movie boasts an A-Minus CinemaScore rating, which is good, and it suggests that word-of-mouth will help box office sales stay strong.

For more on Ready Player One, check out GameSpot's review, as well as our further breakdown of 5 Reasons To Go See It in the video embed above.